by Tana French
The sub-aqua team had found a fishing boat that had been at the bottom of the harbor for a long time, and they made it clear that that was the most interesting thing they were expecting to find. They were faceless and sleek in their dive suits, turning the harbor military and sinister. We thanked them, shook their slick gloved hands and told them to go home. The searchers, who had been working their way across the estate, were dirty, tired and pissed off: they had found eight knives of varying shapes and sizes, all of which had clearly been planted overnight by teenagers who thought they were hilarious geniuses sticking it to the man, and all of which would have to be checked out. I told the team to move the search up to the hill where Conor had hidden his car. According to his story, the weapons had gone into the water, but Richie was right about this much: Conor was playing games with us. Until we knew exactly what games and why, everything he said needed checking.
A rangy guy with blond dreadlocks and a dusty parka was sitting on the Spains’ garden wall, smoking a rollie and looking dodgy. I said, “Can we help you?”
“Howya,” he said, mashing out his smoke on the sole of his shoe. “Detectives, yeah? Tom. Larry said you wanted me to hang on for you.”
What with lab coats and crime-scene overalls and not dealing with the public, the Bureau has lower sartorial standards than we do, but this guy was still something special. I said, “Detective Kennedy and Detective Curran. You’re here about the animal in the attic?”
“Yeah. Want to come inside, see what’s up?”
He looked like he was stoned off his tits, but Larry is ferociously picky about who he works with, so I tried not to write the kid off yet. “Let’s do that,” I said. “Your boys found a dead robin in the back garden. Did you take a look?”
Tom stashed his cigarette butt in his tobacco pouch, ducked under the tape and shambled up the drive. “Yeah, sure, but not a lot there to see. Lar said you wanted to know was it an animal kill or a human one, but all the insect activity wrecked the wound. All I can tell you is it was kind of ragged, yeah? Like, it wasn’t done by a sharp blade. It could’ve been a serrated blade, probably a dull one, or it could’ve been teeth. No way to tell.”
Richie said, “What kind of teeth?”
Tom grinned. “Not human. What, you were thinking your guy was, like, Ozzy?”
Richie grinned back. “Right. Happy Halloween, I’m too old for bats, here’s a robin.”
“That’s so fucked up,” Tom said cheerfully. Someone had mended the Spains’ door—roughly, with a few screws and a padlock—to keep out ghouls and journalists; he dug into his pocket for the key. “Nah. Animal teeth. We could be looking at a rat, or a fox, except both of those would’ve probably eaten the guts and stuff, not just the head. If it was an animal, I’m gonna say probably a mustelid. Like stoats and mink, right? One of that family. They’re into surplus killing.”
I said, “That was Detective Curran’s guess, too. Would a mustelid fit with whatever was going on in the attic?”
The padlock clicked, and Tom pushed the door open. The house was cold—someone had switched the heat off—and the faint tang of lemon in the air had faded: instead it smelled of sweat, the plasticky chemical scent of crime-scene overalls, and old blood. Cleaning up crime scenes isn’t in our job description. We leave the debris behind, the killer’s and our own, until the survivors either call in a professional crew or do it themselves.
Tom headed for the stairs. “Yeah, I read your vic’s Wildwatcher thread. He’s probably right about ruling out mice and rats and squirrels—they’d have been all over the peanut butter. First thing I thought: hey, any of the neighbors got a cat? A couple of things don’t fit, though. A cat wouldn’t just take the head off that robin, and a cat wouldn’t spend a lot of time hanging around the attic without giving itself away—meowing to get down through the attic hatch, or something. They’re not careful about humans the way wild animals are. Plus, your vic said he smelled something musky, yeah? Musky or smoky? Doesn’t sound like cat spray to me. Most of the mustelids, though: yeah, they’ll let off a musky smell.”
He had dug up a stepladder somewhere and put it on the landing, under the hatch. I found my torch. The bedroom doors were still half open; I caught a glimpse of Jack’s stripped bed.
“Careful,” Tom said, swinging himself up through the hatch. Above us, his torch came on. “Pull left, yeah? Don’t want to hit this.”
The trap was on the attic floor, just a few inches to the right of the hatch. I had only seen it in pictures. Solid, it was more powerful and more obscene, wicked teeth splayed wide, torchlight sliding in smooth arcs along the jaws. One look and you heard it, the savage whisk of air, the bone-crunching thud. None of us moved closer.
A long chain straggled across the floor, anchoring the trap to a metal pipe in a low corner, among dusty candlesticks and outgrown plastic toys. Tom nudged the chain with one toe, keeping his distance. “That,” he said, “that’s a leghold trap. Nasty bastards. A couple of extra quid gets you one with padding or offset jaws, so it’ll do less damage, but this one’s old-style, none of your fancy stuff. The animal goes in after the bait, puts pressure on the pan, the jaws bite down and they don’t let go. After a while the animal bleeds out or dies of stress and exhaustion, unless you come back and get it. It could maybe gnaw its own leg off, but it’d probably bleed to death first. This trap’s got a seven-inch jaw spread: it could handle anything up to, like, a wolf. Your vic wasn’t sure what he was chasing, but he was bloody serious about getting it.”
“What about you?” I said. I wished Pat had had the sense to install a light in his attic. I didn’t want to take my torch beam off that trap—it felt like it might slide closer, in the blackness, till someone misjudged a step—but neither was I crazy about all those invisible corners. I could hear the sea, loud through the thin membrane of roof tiles and insulation. “What do you think he was chasing?”
“OK. First question, right, is access. No problems there.” Tom tilted his chin upwards. At the top of the back wall—above Jack’s bedroom, as far as I could figure—was a patch of weak gray light.
I saw what the building inspector had meant: the hole was a ragged gap that looked like the wall had simply ripped away from the roof. Richie let out a mirthless little breath of something like laughter. “Look at that,” he said. “No wonder the builders won’t take the Gogans’ phone calls. Give me enough Lego and I’d build a better estate myself.”
Tom said, “Most of the mustelids, they’re agile little buggers. They could get over the garden wall and up there, no problem, if they were attracted by escaping heat or cooking smells. Doesn’t look to me like an animal actually made the hole, but an animal could’ve expanded it, maybe. See that?” The top edge of the hole, jagged and crumbling; the nibbled insulation. “Teeth and claws could’ve done that, or it could just be weather wear. No way to know for sure. We’ve got the same kind of thing going on over here, too.”
The bar of torchlight swung down and back, over my shoulder. I almost leaped around, but he was only picking out a roof beam in the far corner. He said, “Cool or what?”
The wood was crisscrossed with a frenzy of deep score-marks, in parallel sets of three or four. Some of them were a foot long. The beam looked like it had been attacked by a jaguar. Tom said, “Those could come from claws, come from some kind of machine, come from a knife or like a piece of wood with nails stuck in it. Take your pick.”
The kid was pissing me off—the whoa-dude-chillax attitude to something that I personally wasn’t taking lightly, or maybe just the fact that everyone assigned to this case appeared to be fourteen and I had missed the memo that said we were recruiting at skateboard parks. I said, “You’re the expert here, old son. You’re the one who’s here to tell us what you think. Why don’t you take your pick.”
Tom shrugged. “If I had to bet, I’d go with an animal. No way I can tell you whether it was ever actually up here, though. The marks could’ve been made back when this was a building sit
e and the beam was exposed, or lying around on the ground outside. That might make more sense, seeing as it’s just the one beam, yeah? If something made them up here, though: whoa. See the spaces between the marks?”
He tilted the torch beam to the gouges again. “They’re like an inch apart. That’s not a stoat or a mink. Something with fuck-off big paws did that. If that’s what your vic was hunting, then the trap size wasn’t overkill after all.”
The conversation was getting to me more than it should have. The hidden corners of the attic felt crammed, seething with near-inaudible ticking noises and pinpoint red eyes; all my instincts were prickle-backed and bare-toothed, coiled to fight. I said, “Is there anything else we need to see up here? Or can we finish this chat somewhere that won’t double my dry-cleaning bill every sixty seconds?”
Tom looked faintly surprised. He examined the front of his parka, which looked like he had been wrestling dust balls. “Oh,” he said. “Right. Nah, that’s all the good stuff: I had a look for scat, hairs, any signs of nesting activity, but no dice. We’ll head downstairs, yeah?”
I went down last, keeping my torch focused on the trap. Richie and I both leaned away from it, involuntarily, on our way through the hatch.
“So,” I said, on the landing, getting out a tissue and starting work on my coat—the dust was nasty stuff, brown and sticky, like some kind of toxic industrial by-product. “Tell me what we’re dealing with.”
Tom got comfortable with his arse propped on the stepladder, held up a hand and started ticking off fingers. “OK, so we’re going with the mustelids, yeah? There’s no weasels in Ireland. We’ve got stoats, but they’re tiny, like half a pound: I’m not sure they could make the kind of noise your guy talked about. Pine martens are heavier, and they’re big-time climbers, but there’s no woodland nearer than that hill down at the end of the bay, so he’d be kind of off his patch, and I couldn’t find any marten sightings around here anyway. A mink, though: a mink could work. They like living near water, so”—he tilted his chin towards the sea—“happy days, yeah? They’re surplus killers, they’re climbers, they’re not scared of anything including humans, and they stink.”
I said, “And they’re vicious little bastards. They’d attack a kid, no problem. If you had one in your house, you’d be bloody serious about getting rid of it. Am I right?”
Tom did something noncommittal with his head. “I guess, yeah. They’re crazy aggressive—I’ve heard of mink going for a fifty-pound lamb, eating straight through the eye socket into the brain, moving on to the next one, taking out a couple of dozen in one night. And when they’re cornered, they’ll take on anything. So yeah, you wouldn’t be too happy about one moving in. I’m not totally convinced that’s what we’ve got, though. They’re maybe the size of a big house cat, tops. No reason why they’d need to enlarge the entry hole, no way they could leave those claw marks, and no reason you’d need a trap that size to catch them.”
I said, “Those aren’t deal breakers. According to you, we can’t assume the animal in the attic was responsible for either the hole or the beam. As for the trap, our vic didn’t know what he was hunting, so he erred on the side of caution. A mink’s still in the running.”
Tom examined me with mild surprise, and I realized there had been a bite to my voice. “Well, yeah. I mean, I can’t even swear anything was ever in here, so nothing’s a deal breaker; it’s all hypothetical, yeah? I’m just saying which pieces could fit where.”
“Great. And plenty of them fit with a mink. Any other possibilities?”
“Your other maybe is an otter. The sea’s right there, and they’ve got massive territories, so one of them could live down on the beach and count this house as part of his range. They’re big buggers, too, like two or three feet long, maybe twenty pounds: an otter could’ve left those marks on the beam, and he might’ve needed to enlarge that access hole. And they can get kind of playful, so those rolling noises would make sense—if it found, like, one of those candleholders or those kiddie toys or something, and it was batting it around the attic floor…”
“Three feet, twenty pounds,” I said, to Richie. “Running around your home, right above your kids. That sounds like something that could get a reasonable, sane guy fairly worried. Am I right?”
“Whoa,” Tom said placidly, holding up his hands. “Slow down. It’s not, like, a perfect fit. Otters scent-mark, all right, but they do it with droppings, and your guy didn’t find any. I had a nose around, and I can’t see any either. None in the attic, none under the attic floor, none in the garden.”
Even outside the attic, the house felt restless, infested. The wall at my back, the thought of how thin the plaster was, made me itch. I said, “And I didn’t smell anything, either. Did you?” Richie and Tom shook their heads. “So maybe it wasn’t droppings that Pat smelled: it was the otter itself, and now it hasn’t been around in a while, so the scent’s faded.”
“Could be. They smell, all right. But… I don’t know, man.” Tom squinted off into the distance, working one finger in between the dreadlocks to scratch his scalp. “It’s not just the scent thing. This whole deal, this isn’t otter behavior. End of story. They’re seriously not climbers—I mean, I’ve heard of otters climbing, but that’s like headline news, you know what I mean? Even if it did, something that size going up and down the side of a house, you’ve gotta figure it’ll get seen. And they’re wild. They’re not like rats or foxes, the urbanized stuff that’s OK with living right up against humans. Otters stay away from us. If you’ve got an otter here, he’s a fucking weirdo. He’s the one that the other otters tell their cubs to stay out of his garden.”
Richie tilted his chin at the hole above the skirting board. “You’ve seen these, yeah?”
Tom nodded. “Freaky or what? The vics had the whole place this fancy, all their shit matched, but they were OK with massive holes in their walls? People are weird.”
“Could an otter have made those? Or a mink?”
Tom squatted on his haunches and examined the hole, cocking his head at different angles, like he had all week. “Maybe,” he said, in the end. “It’d help if we had some debris left, so we could at least tell whether these were made from inside the walls or outside, but your vics were serious about cleanup. Someone’s even sanded down the edges—see there?—so if there were claw marks or tooth marks, they’re gone. Like I said: weird.”
I said, “I’ll ask our next vics to be sure and live in a hovel. Meanwhile, work with what we’ve got.”
“No hassle,” Tom said cheerfully. “Mink, I’ve gotta say they couldn’t do it. They’re not really into digging, unless they have to, and with those little paws…” He waved his hands. “The plaster’s pretty thin, but still, it’d take them ages to get that kind of damage done. Otters dig, and they’re strong, so yeah, an otter could’ve done it, easy. Except somewhere along the way he’d get stuck inside the wall, or he’d chew on an electrical wire and bzzt, otter barbecue. So maybe yeah, but probably no. Does that help?”
“You’ve been a great help,” I said. “Thanks. We’ll let you know if any more info comes in.”
“Oh yeah,” Tom said, straightening and giving me a double thumbs-up and a big grin. “This is some mad shit, yeah? Love to see more.”
I said, “I’m delighted we could make your day. I’ll take that key, if you don’t have plans for it.”
I held out my hand. Tom pulled a tangle of crap out of his pocket, picked out the padlock key and dropped it into my palm. “Pleasure’s all mine,” he said cheerfully, and bounced off down the stairs, dreadlocks flapping.
At the gate, Richie said, “I’d say the uniforms left copies of that key at HQ for us, no?”
We were watching Tom slouch off to his car, which inevitably was a green VW camper van in urgent need of a coat of paint. “They probably did,” I said. “I didn’t want that little tosser bringing his mink-spotting mates on a tour of the scene. ‘Like, dude, how totally cool is that?’ This isn’t blood
y entertainment.”
“Techs,” Richie said absently. “You know what they’re like. Larry’s the same, sure.”
“That’s different. A teenager is what this guy’s like. He needs to cop himself on and grow up. Or maybe I’m just not down with the kids these days.”
“So,” Richie said, digging his hands deep into his pockets. He wasn’t looking at me. “The holes, yeah? Not subsidence. And not any animal that your man can put his finger on.”
“That’s not what he said.”
“Just about.”
“‘Just about’ doesn’t count in this game. According to Dr. Dolittle over there, mink and otter are both still in.”
Richie said, “Do you think one of those did the job? Honest to God, like. Do you?”
The air held the first whiff of winter; in the half-houses across the road, the kids trying to get themselves killed were wearing padded jackets and woolly hats. “I don’t know,” I said. “And honest to God, I don’t really care, because even if Pat made the holes, I don’t see how that makes him a homicidal maniac. Like I asked you inside: let’s say you had twenty pounds’ worth of mystery animal running around your attic. Or let’s say you had one of the most crazy aggressive predators in Ireland hanging out right above your son’s bed. Would you be willing to bash a couple of holes in your walls, if you thought that was your best shot at getting rid of this thing? Would that mean there was something wrong with your mind?”
“That wouldn’t be your best shot, but. Poison—”
“Say you’d tried poison, and the animal was too smart to take it. Or, even more likely: say the poison worked just fine, but the animal died somewhere down inside your walls, you couldn’t work out exactly where. Then would you get out the hammer? Would that mean you were fucked-up enough to slaughter your own family?”
